Mudslinging and the debate

It's obvious that McCain wants Americans to think about what a terrorist-lover Obama is and that he's going to try to use tonight's debate to drive home the point ad nauseam. But he'd better be careful.

They don't ask those execrable gotcha questions. They don't tend to make meaningless demands like "Will you commit here and now for all time" that you will or won't X. And they probably won't ask, for the one-millionth boring time, about whether the candidates would rule out force against Iran and things like that -- questions that do not, in other words, seek actual answers, but that seek to make the debater perform for 60 seconds.

Actual people tend to ask actual questions and seek actual answers, like "at my daughter's school," such-and-such is happening that makes a point about Bush's education policy, and they have to take it from there. Education, in fact, tends to come up in these people forums far more than when journalists are in charge, since most journalists are bored by education and don't know the first thing about it.

Paying for college. Health care undoubtedly, and probably more than once. And of course jobs and pensions. All things John McCain has never cared very much about.

And if you have a humble citizen standing up and asking you about his son's tuition bills, you have to answer the question. You can't very well say, "Yeah, I'll take care of that, and meanwhile did I mention to you that you can't trust my opponent to worry about your son's tuition because he knows a man who once tried to blow up buildings, perhaps university buildings of the very sort your son attends classes in?" I don't think so.

This will be an especially interesting night to watch on CNN, which scrolls that voters' real-time response meter across the bottom of the screen. Almost every time McCain attacked during the first debate, the response line dipped toward the negative.